Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> I think platitudes are affecting when they express
> a truth and yet are politically ineffective.
Try this as a provisional formulation: Platitudes cease to be platitudes (in any negative sense) when action and thought are in unity. The song "Solidarity Forever" in isolation is utterly banal --
When the union's inspiration through the workers blood shall run There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one?* But the union makes us strong.
When it is sung (whether well or badly) in a context which embodies it in action it becomes transcendant in its power.
Carrol
*The whole of PL is directed _against_ this proposition.
Thus farr his [Lucifer's] bold discourse without controule Had audience, when among the Seraphim Abdiel, then whom none with more zeale ador'd The Deitie, and divine commands obei'd, Stood up, and in a flame of zeale severe The current of his fury thus oppos'd.
(PL 5, 803-8)
This is the theme of the "One Just Man" which runs through both of Milton's epics. And it is through the action of such isolated individuals that even collective harmony is achieved:
That day, as other solemn dayes, they spent In song and dance about the sacred Hill, Mystical dance, which yonder starrie Spheare 620 Of Planets and of fixt in all her Wheeles Resembles nearest, mazes intricate, Eccentric, intervolv'd, yet regular Then most, when most irregular they seem, And in thir motions harmonie Divine So smooths her charming tones, that Gods own ear Listens delighted.
(PL 5, 618-27)
That is, in a society of abstractly free individuals, in which action is separated from its consequences, order can emerge only from the (invisibly) willed adherence of each social monad to some (invisible) principle of harmony. Or so Milton, Wojtek, and bourgeois ideology join in assuming. But the herd emerges, precisely, _from_ independent "responsible" action. This is what Riesmann called "The Lonely Crowd." And of course there is a good deal of bourgeois literature which is essentially praise of loneliness. See Arnold's "Scholar Gypsy."